March 23 (Bloomberg) -- Some people just shouldn’t be in
charge of high-risk nuclear facilities.

As far back as 2005, I warned Eisaku Sato, governor of
Fukushima at the time, about the dangers of letting spent fuel
accumulate in cooling ponds at the prefecture’s nuclear plants
and the need to put it into much safer dry stores as soon as
possible. He seemed to be the only one who listened. But clearly
there were people who always knew better and whose arrogance
characterizes the nuclear industry.

Almost two weeks after the earthquake and tsunami that
preceded the nuclear disaster in Japan, the crisis is still far
from under control. A massive steam explosion in Unit 3 and a
severe fire in the spent-fuel pools remain possible. How long
will the emergency workers need to spray water on the exposed
reactors? The heat has to be contained for years to come.

It is high time Japanese authorities extend the 20-kilometer (12.4-mile) evacuation zone around the crippled
nuclear-power plant at Fukushima on the Pacific coast.
Contamination levels in foodstuffs have greatly exceeded
official limits more than 100 kilometers away -- even before the
rain washed more radioactivity out of the sky. Pregnant women
and small children should immediately be evacuated from a
progressively increasing area.

Radioactive Releases

Three reactors at the Fukushima-I nuclear power plant are
in advanced stages of meltdown. The core of Unit 4 is in the
cooling pond under the sky after two hydrogen explosions ripped
off the roof and devastated the building. Huge quantities of
radioactivity have been released into the environment, estimated
by the French authorities at 10 percent of the Chernobyl levels
or even more. The main difference is that Fukushima isn’t in the
Ukrainian countryside and the population density is dozens of
times greater: The Tokyo metropolitan area of 40 million people
is hardly 200 kilometers away.

Civil society in all countries should assess the record of
nuclear power and draw the conclusions. Alternatives have been
available for a long time. China now operates four times more
wind power than nuclear capacity and this year will probably
generate more kilowatt-hours from wind than from splitting the
atom. The share of renewable energy in new grid connections in
the U.S. went from 2 percent in 2004 to 55 percent in 2009. Half
of the world’s new generating capacity in 2008-09 was renewable.

French Power

The problem is elsewhere and it’s political. We need to
shift away from top-down supply-oriented projects to
decentralized, highly efficient and flexible systems providing
affordable, clean energy services. This isn’t the case in
France, for example, where almost 75 percent of the country’s
electricity is powered by nuclear energy -- the highest
percentage in the world.

French President Nicolas Sarkozy didn’t wait to gauge the
fallout for the nuclear industry. Three days after what history
might recall as 3/11, he said it is “obviously out of the
question to phase out nuclear power” in France. His special
adviser, Henri Guaino, even sees a chance that the Japanese
disaster “should rather favor our nuclear industry compared to
those of other countries where safety has been put a bit more
into second place.” Of course, neither the president nor his
political adviser is a nuclear expert.

Over the past few decades, the French nuclear industry has
been handed to highly reliable followers in key technocrat
positions, cementing their influence in political decision-making.

High Price

This development has come at a high price. As in Japan, the
system lacks democratic control and is incapable of correcting
mistakes and adjusting to changing realities. The highly praised
French nuclear program has a poor record: fundamental strategic
errors in uranium enrichment technologies; poor load factors for
operating reactors; a 55 percent increase in significant safety
events to more than 1,100 last year compared with 2009; endless
delays and cost overruns for units under construction; and a
plutonium economy that generates substances with no book value
and negative market value.

Who will now lend money for future nuclear projects?
Certainly not commercial banks, which will be even more
reluctant to take on the risk. The World Bank and the Asian
Development Bank never provided any money. The insurance
industry is confident it can stem the costs of the Japanese
disaster. Fitch Ratings explains why: “Damage to nuclear
reactors and nuclear damage for homeowners’ policies are
typically excluded from coverage.”

The nuclear industry has always lacked foresight. On 3/11,
Fukushima operator Tokyo Electric Power Co. was still recovering
after a massive tremor that shut down its seven Kashiwazaki
units on the west coast in July 2007 and three reactors are
still off-line. Tepco and the authorities didn’t hear that wake-up call, brushing off the warnings of many experts.

It’s time to take the arrogance out of nuclear power and
move on.

(Mycle Schneider is an independent analyst of energy and
nuclear policy based near Paris, and was an adviser to the
German Environment Ministry from 2000 to 2010. The opinions
expressed are his own.)